The Top 3 Budgeting Takeaways from the 2025 GFOA Annual Conference

The 2025 Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) Annual Conference was an amazing event. Thousands of attendees attended sessions given by over 300 speakers about a variety of public finance topics over several days in sunny Washington, DC.

Many of the sessions at the GFOA Annual Conference discussed budgeting and how to improve a variety of aspects and parts of budgeting. If you didn’t get to attend these sessions (or you want a refresher), these were our three biggest budgeting-related takeaways from the conference… 

Takeaway 1: Be a “budgeting chef,” and create your own budgeting process to serve your community best

When it comes to budgeting, an approach tailored to your community’s specific needs will always outshine a convenient, one-size-fits-all approach. That’s a key argument within the GFOA’s Rethinking Budgeting initiative, which is encapsulated in the idea that budget professionals should be chefs — not cooks.

Operating as a budgeting cook means limiting yourself to using someone else’s menu (i.e., budgeting process). You’re typically having to be cautious about checking the right boxes rather than focusing on your community’s big picture. But this menu/formula you didn’t set may not be the best fit for your community. 

That’s where being a budgeting chef comes in. As a budgeting chef, you exercise the freedom to create your own recipes (i.e., budgeting processes) that best suit your organization. By exercising creativity, flexibility, and adaptability and creating your own budgeting process, you can focus on the bigger picture and innovate in a way that drives meaningful results for your organization.

Takeaway 2: Foster collaboration in budgeting to maximize input and efficiency

Even the best chef needs a great team of sous chefs, cooks, dishwashers, servers, and more to make their restaurant a success. And similarly, budgeting is done best when it’s a collaborative process.

At the GFOA Annual Conference, municipal and county finance leaders in Virginia and Washington state suggested the following strategies to enhance budgeting collaboration:  

• Convene an executive leadership team within your public organization to work with your finance director and chief administrator in discussing and proposing a community-wide budget. 
• Standardize financial monitoring for your organization’s agencies, with processes and guidance on how to best monitor finances and devise financial plans that could factor into budget creation. 
• Forge information-sharing relationships with neighboring localities — such as nearby municipalities, counties, school districts, or special districts — to propose projects that align with each locality’s priorities and finances.  

Takeaway 3: Get executive and elected official buy-in on budgeting reform by explaining the need in their language

Collaboration with executives, elected officials, and other key decision makers is an essential part of effective budgeting and achieving budget reform. But it’s not always easy to secure leadership buy-in.

The best way to do this, budget leaders at municipalities in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Texas said at the GFOA Annual Conference, is to demonstrate it in language executives can understand. You can do this in a number of ways:

• Align your budgetary reform initiatives with your community’s goals, as identified in your strategic plan, departmental priorities, or community input initiatives.
• Show how budget process improvements can produce organization-wide improvements as well, such as higher bond ratings and greater council/elected official buy-in.
• Empower new executives to become champions of change by informing them about wins in your organization as well as necessary changes to your budgetary processes.

Budgeting the BCM Way

Having a tailored budget plan, a collaborative budgeting process, and a bigger-picture focus for budgeting are all hallmarks of practicing budgeting using modern Budget Cycle Management (BCM) principles. BCM is a strategic framework that transforms budgeting into a holistic, streamlined set of planning and budget management practices that any public agency can implement. The goal of BCM is to ensure a seamlessly integrated approach to budgeting that involves all relevant teams with as little friction as possible. 

BCM-style budgeting prioritizes future planning to mitigate harms from unexpected changes. This means aligning budget goals with strategic planning. It helps to be a budget chef here, since every community’s strategic plan is unique to itself.

Budgeting using BCM principles also leverages the power of cloud-based software to carry out budgeting. Working within the cloud allows real-time collaboration by consolidating communications within the platform in which you create budgets. 

Being able to free yourself from the manual, inefficient processes that come with budgeting in spreadsheets allows you to stop focusing on low-level issues and start focusing on the strategic initiatives that matter. Greater focus on strategic initiatives helps you convey their importance to decision makers — which will help you be the best budgeting chef you can be.

ClearGov can help you plan, budget, and engage your community throughout the entire budget cycle. Watch our product tour webinar and learn how ClearGov is making budgeting easier, more transparent, and future-proof for over 1,300 agencies!